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[TL2] Couldn’t Help Myself

I caved on Friday night and bought the four-pack (cost of one Borderlands 2 game) of Torchlight 2. I kept one, gave one to the LBO and another to the LLO. I have a fourth sitting here waiting to be gifted and I’m debating who to give it to.

On one hand I can gift it to the kids’ friend up the street that plays all sorts of games with them – figuring he’d play this with them too. On the other hand, neither one of the kids has so much as loaded the game up – they’re smitten by Borderlands 2 so I’m tempted to not give that to him.

On to the game.

I played it a little yesterday and was going to play a little of it now but decided I should give my blog some attention.

I went with the Berserker class (picking maniacal looking dude) and started exploding enemies almost right away. The game seems to have more of a flowing overland sprawl to it so far. I’ve seen a few little dungeons, but it’s not like the first one where you (sorta) just delved deeper and deeper (I’ve never heard that before). The story is light so you jump right into click-killing stuff. The short of it is the Alchemist from the first game somehow got corrupted (yeah, I never completed the first game) and turns on everyone. He takes out the Mage and beats down the Warrior until the Warrior has to turn tail and run. That’s where you come in – the Warrior asks you to figure out what is going on and stop him starting with warning some nearby town.

Classes available are Berserker, Engineer, Embermage and Outlander. I didn’t dig too far into them, I just hopped in and started playing figuring the Berserker looked to be more my style in these sorts of games. My assumption is that the Engineer is either melee or ranged – which ever is your preference, the Outlander is a shooter type and the Embermage is the caster type. There are three trees you can put points into per class, like in the first one, these give you new abilities to use or improve on your character in a passive or active way.

You have a few more options for pets; I think there are about eight in total. Your pet can now wear three pieces of armor – a collar and two tags. Feeding them fish does different things to them, just like in the first Torchlight.

One disappointment with Torchlight 2 is that the multiplayer doesn’t immediately tie into Steam. You have to create a Runic Account (like I need another account… really..) then it can synch from your Steam account for your friends list. I won’t bellyache over this a lot, just a little. The smooth integration between your Steam Friends list and Borderlands 2 spoiled me and I wish more games would go this route. Honestly, I don’t see myself using my Runic Account for anything other than Torchlight 2 Multiplayer so it’s only a matter of time before I forget what password I used for that and have to jump through some password recovery hoops.

Graphics and sound are much like the first Torchlight and the UI performs the same way. Not a lot of really big changes. There are tabs on the side of the screen for pulling out windows; character stats, pet, inventory, etc.

More of the same that you either loved or hated in Torchlight but with multiplayer!